The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: Care Santos' "Dissection"

Care Santos

Offering

I
I clutch your hand:
the hands that have held my body so many times,
the first that found, on birth, our children,
those that touch, repair, and arrange the things
that fill my present.

I clutch your hands
and leave above them the fragments
of this almost-worn-out heart.
Take it apart like a watch,
classify its parts,
polish them, clean them, throw them away,
try to make everything later fit
so that everything stays as it was,
so that its tick tock is the same as ever,
so that the cracks don’t ooze rust.

I I
The faith I have in you is due, in part,
to the fact that you well know the gizmo
(from that first day on which we were suicides
I’ve never been far from your hands)
and also to how much I remember your tastes.

For example: to assemble and dismantle mechanisms
and later boast of your skill.
For example: the pride of seeing that our life
some time ago began on a tightrope
and that’s why we don’t get vertigo from heights
nor do we fear of falling, if the moment is intense.

I’m just like you, don’t you remember?
The woman who doesn’t think of anything
except that, for you, I’d risk everything
again and again, a thousand times if necessary.

I only want to know that your gaze
holds more future than past
and is the crossroads that leads away from hell.

This selection comes from Care Santos’ book Dissection available now from A Midsummer Night’s Press. Purchase your copy here!

Care Santos (Mataró, 1970) is one of Spain’s most versatile and prolific writers. Writing in both Catalan and Spanish, she is the author of over 40 books in different genres, including novels, short story collections, young adult and children’s books, poetry, etc. She has won numerous prizes and awards, including the Ateneo Joven from Seville, the Alfonso de Cossío Short Story Prize, and in young adult literature both the Gran Angular Prize and the Barco de Vapor Prize, among many others. Dissection won the Carmen Conde Award for a book of poetry by a woman writer in 2007. Her novel Habitaciones cerradas was adapted into a television series. Her novel Desig de xocolata (written in Catalan) won the 34th Ramon Llull Prize and was translated into English by Julie Wark and published by Alma Books as Desire for Chocolate. Her work has also been translated into Basque, Galician, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Korean, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, Swedish, as well as English. She lives with her family in Mataró, Barcelona.

Lawrence Schimel (New York, 1971) writes in both Spanish and English and has published over 100 books as author or anthologist, including the Spanish-language poetry collection Desayuno en la cama and the English-language chapbooks Fairy Tales for Writers and Deleted Names. He has won the Lambda Literary Award (twice), the Independent Publisher Book Award, the Spectrum Award, and other honors. He lives in Madrid, Spain, where he works as a Spanish->English translator.

librecht baker. Dembrebrah West African Drum and Dance Ensemble member. Kouman Kele Dance and Drum Ensemble memeber. MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts from Goddard College. VONA/Voices & Lambda Literary Fellow. Sundress Publications’ Assistant Editor. Poetry in Writing the Walls Down: A Convergence of LGBTQ Voices & CHORUS: A Literary Mixtape. Currently, birthing & manifesting.